I am happy to announce that Marble is now available in extras. Marble is a Virtual Globe whose mobile version features advanced routing capabilities.

Marble 1.0
Key features introduced by Marble 1.0.0 are

Online and offline routing (worldwide)

GPS tracking and route guidance

Many different map themes

The packages for the base version take up 4.9 MB. Support for map themes other than OpenStreetMap is provided in an extra package (6.6 MB). Further map data is downloaded automatically.

Online and Offline Routing

When an Internet connection is available, Marble can retrieve routes from OpenRouteService (Europe) and Yours (Worldwide). Additionally you can calculate routes directly on the N900 without the need for an Internet connection using the Monav backend. Offline routing requires additional country maps which can be downloaded conveniently from within Marble. See this tutorial for further instructions.

Routes retrieved from OpenRouteService and Monav include driving instructions. During your journey, these instructions are highlighted appropriately.

GPS Tracking and Route Guidance

The internal GPS of the N900 is used to retrieve your current location. The track is shown in the map and can be saved for further analysis in other programs.

In route guidance mode, driving instructions are announced in front of turn points. The map follows you as you move; Marble adjusts the zoom value automatically according to your speed.

Map Themes

A wide variety of map themes is supported, each consisting of one or more layers. The interactive legend can be used to adjust the current map theme to your liking.

Note that not all map themes can be shipped due to legal reasons. Google Maps or Ovi Maps themes are therefore not shipped, for example.

And More...

Translations for 50 languages are included. At the time of writing these translations are incomplete however; the final version Marble 1.0 (scheduled for 2011-01-26) will ship with completed translations.

Many dialogs have been replaced with the easier to use stackable windows. The turn instructions are now shown in their own window, fixing the scrolling issues that occurred in the routing dialog.

All info boxes can now be locked (position becomes fixed) and hidden. This allows for example to get rid of the overview map if you don't like it. Some info boxes provide configuration options. These features are available via the context menu of info boxes. Click on an info box with the pen and hold it down for some seconds to open the context menu.

To make it easier to use Marble alongside other applications like Mappero, OpenStreetMap data is now shared using the /home/user/MyDocs/.maps/OpenStreetMap I/ directory. Existing data is migrated during the upgrade. You'll be informed about the migration (which can take some minutes if you downloaded much data) and have the option to cancel it.

One of the much requested features is voice navigation. Marble 1.1 introduces this feature as a technical preview. You can choose between sound output (turn points are announced with a sound) and speakers. We don't ship any speaker with our packages, but you can use TomTom voices: Download one of the free ones (some websites offer them for personal use), convert it with our web frontend and copy it to your N900. See this tutorial for details.

We call the voice navigation feature a technical preview because there are two known problems: The volume is not adjusted correctly and the voice output does not indicate the distance to announced turn points. We'll fix these issues once we identified the problem in the phonon backend.

Please note that the Marble 1.1 relase is not (as usual) aligned with the other KDE application releases. For this reason new and changed strings have not been adjusted by our translation teams. Practically the translations shipped with Marble 1.1 are still much better than those in Marble 1.0 due to bugfixes in the translation conversion tools.

Marble 1.2
Marble 1.2 introduces offline search and comes with two speakers for voice navigation pre-installed. Further speakers can be downloaded from edu.kde.org.

Marble 1.3
Marble 1.3 is able to show elevation profiles for routes (worldwide). The required data is downloaded from a KDE server and cached locally such that subsequent calculations of elevation profiles work offline. Two new overlays show GPS information (speed, altitude, direction, precision).

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When an Internet connection is available, Marble can retrieve routes from OpenRouteService (Europe) and Yours (Worldwide). Additionally you can calculate routes directly on the N900 without the need for an Internet connection using the Monav backend. Offline routing requires additional country maps which can be downloaded conveniently from within Marble. See this tutorial for further instructions.

It looks excellent. I'll definitely give it a try. Now we know where Nokia can stick their half-baked Ovi Maps.

__________________'Men of high position are allowed, by a special act of grace, to accomodate their reasoning to the answer they need. Logic is only required in those of lesser rank.' - J K Galbraith

OMG, this sounds and looks awesome.
Offline maps AND offline routing AND voice navigation.
Will try it soon.

I see written turn-by-turn directions, but I see nothing that leads me to believe this app provides a voice navigation feature.

While initially this looks promising, it still has a ways to go before being ready for smooth operation on the N900. I've also experienced several crashes after only minutes of use. And the menu scrolling is really rough. Menus seem to aggresively snap between the top and the bottom, and scrolling to a point in between is virtually impossible.
Another feature I don't see is the ability switch the units from kilometers and meters to miles and feet.
But I'll reserve my final judgement until version 1.0 is released.